Dear Liby,
Thanks for re-posting your article here and to open it up for discussion.

I copy the conclusion section from your article to here to draw more attention to it:

We hope that the next iteration of Swachh Bharat Mission will truly lead to a Swachh Bharat. Based on our experience, we would like to draw the following charter of demands:

1. Strengthen the ways of providing household sanitation infrastructure

- Add a bathing room component to the design and costing provided in the national guidelines; increase financial support per household to INR 18,000 for new entrants; allow additional funding of INR 6,000 per household for those wanting to add a bathroom to their existing toilets.
- Create provisions for repair or upgradation of toilets built, till 2018; provide for additional assistance to households whose toilets were built by contractors without involvement of the household.
- Provide financial assistance for new households in villages already declared ODF.
- Correct errors in the baseline of deserving households.

2. Integrate piped water supply with sanitation at the household level, and facilitate greater community control over rural drinking water projects

- Enlarge the scope for Swajal scheme by allocating more funds.
- Where ground water availability challenges dictate building of larger projects, it will make sense to separate the pumping and supply, from household distribution of water. The former could be done centrally for a large number of villages, while the latter could be managed by the communities at their level.
- Make individual household–level piped water supply the standard design principle for rural water supply projects.
- Build community capacities to manage groundwater resources and undertake watershed and springshed interventions.
- Integrate water quality management as a community–level initiative, by demystifying testing technologies, and creating a wider network of testing laboratories.

3. Deepen and integrate WSH interventions for better health and nutrition outcomes at the community-level

Incentivise states to achieve stronger schematic and financial convergence between National Health Mission and the Integrated Child Development Services at the intermediate and gram panchayat level.

4. Create a multi-stakeholder institutional platform to deepen and sustain SBM across rural India

- Incentivise states to enable Panchayati Raj Institutions to play a greater role in the SBM process.
- Allow for more active participation of civil society organisations as facilitators and implementors, to support rural community–based institutions to adopt sustainable sanitation interventions. Provide financial incentives to such organisations based on outputs and outcomes.

Your charter of demands makes sense to me. What are the chances that you will be heard?

And I would like to know what your reaction is to this discussion here where one of your colleagues in India argued that open defecation in rural areas is not all bad and should actually be continued. Perhaps you would like to comment there (or here):
forum.susana.org/162-public-awareness-ra...-not-use-that-toilet

Regards,
Elisabeth

Dear Members

Some of you may find this article of interest.

Liby Johnson

idronline.org/rural-sanitation-a-charter-of-demands/